“I don’t resent [Bush],” he said. “I’m angry at myself for not recognizing that when someone comes at you with an attack campaign, you’ve got to fight back. You’ve got to have a carefully thought-out strategy to deal with it, and we didn’t. I blame myself more than anyone else.”

Estrich, however, who has written about her own experience as a rape survivor, said she had known very well how powerful the Willie Horton issue would be.

“No one understood better the power of that incident than I did... It was an issue, and it was an issue we knew was coming.”

But Estrich, who is a 1977 graduate of the Law School, said that Dukakis “was not a great one for throwing the mud at the other guy. Even in the primaries he used to frustrate us because he didn’t want to go negative on the other side.”

For Estrich, it became clear that Dukakis had lost the election during the presidential debate moderated by CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. Shaw had opened the debate by asking Dukakis if he would favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer were his own wife raped and murdered, and Dukakis responded that he would not.

According to Estrich, she, Bill Clinton, and Dukakis had rehearsed his answer to what she called “the passion question,” but Dukakis had failed to recognize the question about his wife for what it was—a chance to salvage his image from the Bush campaign’s accusations.

Estrich was the first person to see Dukakis after the debate. She recalled that he came up to her and said, “I blew it. I’m sorry.”

“Some of the things [Dukakis is] most criticized for are sticking to his principles, like death penalty,” Heymann said in an interview. “He stuck to his principles and is a totally honorable guy.”

But, in Estrich’s view, an “honorable guy” is not necessarily a winning politician: Dukakis’s refusal to retaliate against the Bush campaign was not his most advantageous decision.

“The sad commentary is that it reflects very positively on his integrity and his dignity,” she said,“but it just wasn’t a winning strategy.”

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.